18 January 2009

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a not-for profit membership organisation whose primary objective is to raise awareness of the importance of the preservation of digital material and the attendant strategic, cultural and technological issues. It acts as an enabling and agenda-setting body within the digital preservation world and works to meet this objective through a number of high level goals. Its vision is to make our digital memory accessible tomorrow.

The activities and members of the Coalition will operate by the following principles:

Openness: The Coalition and its members commit to promoting and disseminating information and sharing outcomes so that we can all learn and benefit as quickly as possible from transferable lessons and experience (both positive and negative).

Collaboration: Digital preservation has become so significant a phenomenon (in scope, complexity, and investment), that no single organisation can address all the challenges alone.

The Coalition provides a forum for members to identify relevant issues and support to pursue collaboration across organisations and sectors to mutual benefit.

Collective benefit: Core Coalition activities supported by resources from its membership must be of common interest and benefit to them. Projects or the activities of individual members may have narrower collective benefit and can contribute to the wider goals of the Coalition but are separately funded.

Vendor neutrality: The goals of the Coalition are generic and will be vendor neutral. It will support the development of standards and generic approaches to digital preservation, which can be implemented by a range of hardware, software, and service vendors.

Well, that's got open source, open access and open data written right through it, hasn't it?

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.